Inside Echelon

kris writes "German magazine Telepolis has an article by Duncan Campbell about Inside Echelon. The article gives a nice overview about what Echelon is and how it came to be. This article is available in a German Version as well." Somewhat lengthy, and written with an agenda, but very interesting. Although I have to say it's wierd seeing banner ads in german ;)

Comments

Come and get Slashdot, echelon/carnivore!

[Anonymous Coward]

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Meade SEAL Team 6 Honduras PLO NSA terrorist Ft. Meade strategic supercomp uter $400 million in gold bullion quiche Honduras BATF colonel Treasury domestic disruption SE AL Team 6 class struggle smuggle M55 M51 Physical Security Division Room 2A0120, OPS 2A building 688- 6911(b), 963-3371(s). Security Awareness Division (M56) Field Security Division (M52) Al A mn al-Askari Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI) Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdiens t Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopasnasti

encryption, people, encryption!

[griffjon]

We have PGP, PGPi, and myriads of other secure email methods. why are people not using them? They'd render Carnivore and Echelon much, much less useful. Well, that and anoynmous browsing, IPSec, etc.

The default presumption must now be that someone is reading your email and parsing your logs--it's almost certainly automatic, but it's there. You should check your personal website logs and see what interesting .mil and .gov and .arpa hits /you/ get. I've been spidered by NIPR.mil -- an interesting site in and of itself. Search cryptome.org for what it does...

So, today's moral is USE ENCRYPTION. I have my 4096 bit public key on the standard servers and on my /. user page.

Encryption is not the answer.

[rjh]

For every social problem, there is a technological solution that is elegant, simple and wrong. The current state of encryption technology is a brilliant example.

Lots of people have done studies of how easy it is to properly use encryption software. In one study, something like half the test subjects were unable to send out a PGP-encrypted message--this wasn't using the (arcane) command line of the 2.6 versions, but the much slicker GUI of the 5.x versions.

Guess what? It hasn't gotten much better. In some respects, it's become worse. The vast majority of people are unaware of the scope of automated surveillance, and as such, they don't care. Of the minority that is aware, the majority of them are unaware of how useful encryption tools can be. Of the minority that is aware, the majority are unable to look at competing products and come to an informed determination about which product is the superior of the two--"Honey, this one says it uses `superhumanly strong 40-bit Blowfish email encryption', and the other one just says it uses Triple DES, which do you think I should buy?".

Of the minority which IS aware of the scope of the problem, which is ALSO aware of the existence of tools, which is ALSO capable of selecting the proper tools and using them properly...

... most of them find encryption to be too much of an inconvenience.

Passphrases are hard to remember; at 1.2 bits of entropy per character (roughly), you need about 120 characters for a good passphrase. That's about two lines of text from a novel. Assuming you can type 60 WPM, or five characters a second, you're going to be spending 24 seconds just entering your passphrase.

That's inconvenient. How do most people deal with the inconvenience? They simply choose not to bother, or else they choose trivially weak passphrases, or they cache their passphrases for an absurdly long time, or...

Encryption, by itself, is not the answer--not unless you're so rabidly paranoid that you're willing to put up with the inconvenience even for something as simple as an email to your girlfriend saying "hey, I'm going to be home early from the office tonight, want to catch a movie?".

Some people are. I'm not. I use encryption for the things which are important--truly confidential material; company secrets, or communications with my lawyer, or other things in that vein. But otherwise, it's just damned inconvenient.

What we need is not "more encryption, dammit!". What we need is more usable encryption. This means:

* Encryption which is EASY TO USE
* Encryption which is HARD TO SCREW UP
* Encryption which is CONVENIENT
* Encryption which is TRANSPARENT TO THE END USER

We don't have any of that right now. We're not even close on most of those counts.

-- And by the by, there's absolutely no point in an average person using a 4,096-bit key. :) Right now even a 1,024-bit key is pretty safe, and a 2,048-bit key ought to be just fine for the indefinite future.

Validity?

[NetCurl]

Can anyone lend any validity to this article? It appears that this person:

A) Knows a lot about this

or

B) Is making all this up in an attempt at a good story.

or

C) A little of both

Those pictures of "interception stations" are strangely similar to every other large, white satellite dish you see around. In fact, there is one of those on top of the building I'm in right now. Is this a conspiracy?

Some of this stuff ("Nor is equipment available with the capacity to process and recognise the content of every speech message or telephone call.") sounds sorta wrong. I believe that the technology is there, maybe not to do EVERY call, but to single calls out by region or randomly sampled conversations.

I'd like to know if anyone can truely verify what this article says as truth.

Re:Validity?

[DrWiggy]

I've been watching Duncan Campbell for some years. Many claim he is the person who is standing up for the common man and is bringing to our attention devastating facts about how the government is invading the human rights of the citizens and subjects they are there to serve.

I think he's a twat.

The reason for this is quite simple. If you ever got through the UK education system and do a modern History curriculum you will be taught about how it is far more important to be able to evaluate evidence on it's own merits rather than being able to spout out figures and statistics and dates. You will be taught that whenever you read an article by any individual that is supposedly fact with some opinions expressed, you must understand the biases that the writer may have, and what the motives for writing those articles are.

Duncan has made a great living out of writing this sort of stuff. People want to read it, because it confirms their darkest suspicions, allows them to fantasise about what secret agencies really do, and in general lets them slip into a sort of "James Bond"-esque world that perhaps they wish to be a part of themselves. It never crosses their minds that it's a good thing that the NSA is intercepting a load of traffic, or the fact that maybe they aren't doing it at all - they want to believe this stuff so badly, they'll read anything that confirms it.

Therefore, we come back to Duncan's motives. He makes money out of writing this stuff, and has written several books that have afforded him a very nice life indeed. He has yet to come up with one single piece of concrete irrefutible (sp?) evidence to confirm any of his claims, and yet editors lick his writing up like cream - it's good column inches.

Furthermore, if any of Duncan's claims were in any way true, seeing as he lives in the UK and is therefore subject to the Official Secrets Act, by now he would have been arrested and his writings D-noticed. You would have to find them in the darker corners of the net rather than splatterd all over the UK National dailys, ZDnet, etc. Nobody cares about this though, because it allows the agencies concerned to ask for bigger budgets from those in power who think this is all a very good thing, instills fear in those criminals who believe that their major drugs operations are being monitored (now that's cheap policing if ever I saw it), and gives Duncan piles and piles of cash. It also entertains the rather moronic tabloid minds amongst our society into believing that Really Exciting Things happen down at NSA.

It's all spin, and you're expected to believe it. If you believe it, so do the criminals, and perhaps that's the point.
--

Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. but old

[cmuncey]

Actually this is quite believeable and real -- just not very new. Almost all of this has been reported on for decades, with only the 'Echelon' brand name and big huhu with the Europeans (the NATO members among them damm well knew about this long ago) being new. Its old news gathered from better authors repackaged for those who were not paying attention and have been watching too many X-Files episodes.

For example, Campbell cites "TOP SECRET UMBRA" as the top level compartment for SIGINT. Well, it was -- in the 1960's. (It doesn't matter that much as the entire system is being completely revised eliminating TOP SECRET entirely -- see FAS's web site which is generally much better on this kind of thing when John Pike has time to update it.)

It's an important issue, but it would pay to use better sources. To see how old this information is check out David Kahn's The Codebreakers or William Burrows's Deep Black.

there are few things more irritating than a crpto geek . . . ask my wife . .

I paid for that, and you might have also.

[Tiger Smile]

Items like this have a cost in, building, maintaining, and expanding. This system, I'm am very sure, it also keeping track of efforts to avoid it's watchfull eye.

When we speak about PGP or using encryption to keep our conversions secret, the NSA is listening. I'm sure they claim this is a valuable service.

It reminds me of something I once saw at a large company. There was a man high up in management who had little to do and few people working for him. He wanted to change this, so he had a plan to inclease his value to the company. He hired some lawyers and asked that all documents, internal and external, went through his department to make sure that there was nothing in those documents that could hurt the company legally.

This seemed like a good service to the company and it only required two lawyers. Well as the company was forced, and got used to, sending their document to these two lawyer there was far too much work. So the manager asked for more lawyer, because the demand was too high. And so on...

His empire withing the company grew and grew. He has added many other non value added services to his group, and I assume will continue to.

This sort of activity is know as "Justifying your position" or "Making yourself needed" This guy knew nothing other than how to make the company feel he was needed and providing a needed service. In reality the internal news letter never had andproblems and never would. The NSA is "Justifying their position."

The NSA and other organizations can spy on people to the Nth degree, and they might find something. They then often keep that information secret from the people paying them, but let higher ups in the goverment know. This information makes these people feel important, and maybe protect there jobs.

In the meantime, we have done this spying by trampling the good names of those who broke from such a spying goverment to found the US. We have teken the values that they penned with wisedom for us all to read, and now claim that they do not appliy to everyone, or all the time.

See under the US constitution you have rights. These are rights which we agree on one day belong to every single person. Human right. On an other day, during a war or a day when oil is lacking, or when a US company wants a contract over a French company, those rights don't apply. Seme people are more equal that others it seem.

Once we drew the line and said that one some days others (outside the US) don't the same freedoms and right under the US government, it was easy to slowly claim our own people didn't have rights also.

Where does that leave us, the peole of the world. If you live in the US your are automatically part of the goverment. After all it's "We the people." If the goverment does something monsterous, then it's because you sat back and let it happen. You are lazy because it's only happening to those people over there, or maybe just to the people down the street. Well now it's happening to you, and you just sit there and hope it does not stop Monday night sports.

I live in the US. I've lived here my entire life. The US should be held to the standards of our fouders, and nothing less. How have we honored their ideals. The same ideals that gave us this country and the American dream of living free. I do not include being spied on one of the freedoms our counties founder envisioned.

Unless the people of the US get off their fat asses and do something, they are to blame. Not the goverenment, because we are the goernment. We paid for it, and let it happen. If we were not told that means little seeing as we choose not to ask.

The buck does not stop with the leaders in DC. That is a lie. We put that person there. The president might be the countries leader, but we are his rulers. We let him know what can and cannot be done. If we are quite the world can assume correctly that we areee with the monsterous deeds of our goverment.

Not Duncan Campbell again!

[cybaea]

Seriously guys: this man goes on and on and on... A quick search on AltaVista for his name and Echelon turns up more than 20 pages of hits.

This guy never stops. He appars to be totally paranoid and he has -- as far as I can tell -- done no original research on his own.

Yes, it is worthwhile to discuss Echelon, the implications of Echelon, and, more generally, the role of intelligence services in democratic and civilised nations. But the ravings of this guy is not the right place to start a sensible discussion.

Please, can we get back to technology now? Try to read about flesh eating robots (seriously!) in the New Scientist for something more interesting than this guy.

---

"Where do you come from?"

Countermeasures article on FIPR

[cybaea]

FIPR has a rather nice article on how you can protect yourself. The article is aimed against RIP, the draconian UK legislation that is currently winding it's way through parliament, but it is genrally useful.

It is a well written, balanced, and informative article, with useful pointers to resources on the internet.

The two mail services that offer encrypted e-mail are probably worth mentioning explicitly:

• http://www.messagerx.com
• http://www.mail2web.com

The article concludes:

The technical thinking behind the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill is inept. Criminals can easily circumvent the measures envisaged and the ways in which they are likely to react will actually pose much more serious problems for UK law enforcement authorities than the problems the legislation is intended to solve. At the same time the measures will damage confidence in cryptography and this will be detrimental to the privacy, safety and security interests of honest individuals and businesses and to the UK's aspirations in e-commerce.

---

"Where do you come from?"

Yeah, so?

[Denor]

This isn't news - anyone can go inside echelon. They give you these little badges, and an honor guard escorts you around, walking backward the whole way and talking about the places you visit. Then you can go to the Echelon gift shop and pick up a T-shirt.
Wait, no, I'm thinking "Pentagon" again....

Best location for privacy?

[molo]

Keep in mind - it's your choice to live in a National Security State. (The US is no longer a democracy, because we no longer control our security democratically). There are other nations that handle things differently. You do have the choice to leave.

Personally, I have not done much international travel and I don't know much about security/privacy practices of other countries. Where could I go (besides SeaLand) that affords me better protection?

This is not flamebait, I just am looking for more info.

Thanks.

Baby monitors

[jehreg]

I live right next to the Canadian ECHELON site (Leitrim & Bank, in Ottawa). Every once in a while, my baby monitor starts buzzing for a few minutes. I am ready to bet that they spy on my monitor to calibrate a few things :-)
Anyone know where I can get a 128-bit key encrypted baby monitor ??

On another note, I wanted to try something out: They can see my house from the base, so I wanted to buy an old (huge) satellite dish and aim it at them, but not connect it to anything...
Then I would just aim a video camera at the dish and see marines come in at night and dismantle the dish :-)

Jehreg

Re:Menwith Hill

[DrWiggy]

I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.

Have you looked at any Oradanance Survey maps of any "normal" RAF bases at all, and tried to correlate runways on the ground with runways on the map? No? Try it. It's rather difficult. Why do you think that might be? Perhaps because they might want to make it a little harder for enemies to bomb them to smithereens?

The argument that things don't appear on maps because there is something ultra-secretive there is just plain stupidity - it's not on any maps not because the governments concerned don't want people to know that it exists, but because they don't want to hand the enemy a scale drawing of where all the buildings are. To do so is just plain ridiculous. Especially in the case of Menwith Hill where there are large red-bordered road signs directing traffic to it all over the place (as RAF Menwith Hill).

As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. He is a poor quality comedian at best and funnily enough Channel Four in the UK have commisioned a high-profile show all to himself because he's "right-on" and tackling "the system". If he didn't do this sort of stuff he would be a nobody with no show of his own.

I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. Had it come across anybody's mind in this thread that Echelon is just a huge pile of baloney cooked up by the NSA to get extra funding so they can have some really great coke-fuelled paries? No? Why, because the Washington Post didn't write an article about it? :-)


--

Information warfare but against whom?

[Kryptonomic]

"They knew that privacy and security, then as a century ago, lay in secret codes or encryption. Until such protections become effective and ubiquitous, Echelon or systems like it, will remain with us."

I couldn't agree more with this conclusion. The main reason Echelon and other privacy invading projects such as Carnivore can thrive in the first place, is that the people don't use crypto and anon-services. Why?

People in general seem to live under the impression that their lives are not interesting enough for anyone to snoop on. "Why should anyone spend money and time reading my e-mails or listening to my phone conversations? I've got nothing to hide".

This is exactly the kind of an attitude that benefits the law enforcement and intelligence agencies and, as a result, people aren't encouraged to use crypto -- even if at the same time the very same agencies keep on hyping how dangerous a place the net is and how much more funding they need to counter this threat. Furthermore, and not surprisingly, major software companies have not, so far, put much an effort into producing an easy to use e-mail system that would incorporate strong encryption and authentication. On the contrary, Microsoft (let's face it, Microsoft's products dominate the market) seems to be hell bent on producing software that's full of security holes and whenever encryption has been included, ominous NSAKEYs and other intelligence agency connections seem to be involved. I don't know about you, but MS doesn't really give me the warm and fuzzy feeling when it comes to security and privacy.

It is also wrong to assume that your, mine or Joe Sixpack's life is not interesting enough to warrant occasional or even constant surveillance by the authorities. Joe Sixpack is a part of the body politic and, as every citizen, is also a potential criminal. To the big business, he's a consumer and his habits are valuable information. Oh yes, he'd be very well worth of watching if you just could do it.

And with new technology, you can.

Current technology provides the law enforcement community (and why not the business community as well) possibilities that even the hard core technophiles do not always fully comprehend. In the past, in order to keep an eye on someone required a group of people to operate the equipment 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Unless you happened to live in a full fledged police state, like DDR where half of the population had been hired to spy on the other half, the authorities just couldn't keep an eye on everyone.

Nowadays, as the article points out, e-mails, faxes and phone calls can be screened automatically based on keywords or even your voice. Automatic face recognition is making its way to mainstream surveillance allowing a more effective use of those cameras you can see in any major European city center (don't know about US). It's becoming so easy for the authorities to monitor the bulk of the population that the tempatation to gather dirt illegally on political opponents, keep an eye on special interest groups and collect brownie-points for cracking down on crime by spying on everyone even remotely connected to the case must soon be overwhelming. Obviously the authorities aren't the only threat. Spammers and people who are in the business of profiling netizens also benefit from the complacent attitude towards privacy.

Is new legislation controlling the new technology answer then? I doubt that. There is not enough political will or technological know-how within the legislative branch to do it. However, as long as using strong encryption is legal, we can at least retain our privacy in the net. Unfortunately, it doesn't help if only the people who are interested in technology use encryption when all the majority of the people know about encryption is that "only criminals use it". People need to be educated about privacy, cryptography and their right to keep things hidden even from the government.

We can't vote on every single thing...

[adipocere]

"We can't vote on every single thing that happens in government..."

I humbly suggest that the potential to do that is now at hand. I'm not sure which Presidents have lost the public vote, but ended up Presidents because of the electoral college, but the technology, if not actually present, is at hand for online voting and direct democratic participation in the government. We could dispatch the electoral college entirely. In fact, I'm somewhat at a loss as to its current utility. We've had what it takes to eliminate the electoral college for decades, as far as I can tell.

Certainly, I will not sit on filibuster.gov or something, waiting all day to cast my vote on every little thing, but, I don't have to vote on every little thing right now. I could conceivably vote on the issues which were important to me.

This technology could start at the county/city level, move up to the state level, and then eventually federal.

Also, we need not control the troops in the woods. How about people casting simple, "let's get out of Vietnam" votes? We need not try to vote in every little thing, all the time. We could concentrate on some of the broader issues.

Mind you, some of the Greeks thought that this would be mob rule, and the elitist in me cringes at the thought of millions of sub-100-IQ Americans punching away at the "Let's have gladiators on national holidays and public torture of criminals!" option on their WebTVs, but with a small but bold experiment at a local level, we could see how it works out.

Jean-Louis Gassée

[11223]

From The Quotable JLG:
"I am afraid of what voters will let government do in the name of national security. I fret about the power of the NSA."
Red Herring, December 1996
http://www.bedope.com/qjlg/

Great analogy

[11223]

I saw a great analogy in the paper in an article about Carnivore (yes, the paper in meatspace) saying that communicating by email is like two corporations in buildings surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns communicating over postcards.

The moral of the story is that you're using a public network when you use email. While it's certainly immoral and usually illegal to snoop, governments will always do whatever it takes to insure their power. We've seen it time and time again with the US's relationships with other countries.

Knowing that, we know that in general they will be watching for all threats. If a coalition decides to form to watch these threats, like Echelon, it will happen. If you insist on using these postcards, at least encrypt your data.

Keep in mind - it's your choice to live in a National Security State. (The US is no longer a democracy, because we no longer control our security democratically). There are other nations that handle things differently. You do have the choice to leave.

The other side of Echelon

[rockwall]

Sure, Echelon and its ilk scares the hell out of me, but think about it for a bit: if such a system did exist, what an incredible engineering feat it would be!

Can you imagine all the CPU power backing it up, the massive amounts of bandwidth, the sophisticed language parsers (something tells me it's a bit more complex than "does this message contain 'bomb'?") and the satellite and ground-based listening posts?

It's a shame that humanity's greatest concerted efforts of high-technology have usually been destructive in nature. (I don't claim exceptions are non-existant -- look at Apollo.) I wonder what that says about out nature.

How cool would it be if some of technology involved would trickle down sooner rather than later. Think about all the incredibly cool -- and useful -- things we could do!

yours,
john